at throw
valuable light on the manners and customs of our forefathers and on
the history of the country, all disappear and can never be replaced. A
great writer has likened an old house to a human heart with a life of
its own, full of sad and sweet reminiscences. It is deplorably sad
when the old mansion disappears in a night, and to find in the morning
nothing but blackened walls--a grim ruin.

Our forefathers were a hardy race, and did not require hot-water
pipes and furnaces to keep them warm. Moreover, they built their
houses so surely and so well that they scarcely needed these modern
appliances. They constructed them with a great square courtyard, so
that the rooms on the inside of the quadrangle were protected from the
winds. They sang truly in those days, as in these:--

Sing heigh ho for the wind and the rain,
For the rain it raineth every day.

[Illustration: Oak Panelling. Wainscot of Fifteenth Century, with
addition _circa_ late Seventeenth Century, fitted on to it in angle of
room in the Church House, Goudhurst, Kent]

So they sheltered themselves from the wind and rain by having a
courtyard or by making an E or H shaped plan for their dwelling-place.
Moreover, they made their walls very thick in order that the winds
should not blow or the rain beat through them. Their rooms, too, were
panelled or hung with tapestry--famous things for making a room warm
and cosy. We have plaster walls covered with an elegant wall-paper
which has always a cold surface, hence the air in the room, heated by
the fire, is chilled when it comes into contact with the cold wall and
creates draughts. But oak panelling or woollen tapestry soon becomes
warm, and gives back its heat to the room, making it delightfully
comfortable and cosy.

One foolish thing our forefathers did, and that was to allow the great
beams that help to support the upper floor to go through the chimney.
How many houses have been burnt down owing to that fatal beam! But our
ancestors were content with a dog-grate and wood fires; they could not
foresee the advent of the modern range and the great coal fires, or
perhaps they would have been more careful about that beam.

[Illustration: Section of Mouldings of Cornice on Panelling, the
Church House, Goudhurst]

Fire is, perhaps, the chief cause of the vanishing of old houses, but
it is not the only cause. The craze for new fashions at the beginning
of the last century doomed to death many